been reading: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

After a nasty divorce and an emotional breakdown, Elizabeth Gilbert decides she needs to regain control of her life. She chooses to take a year off and spend the time seeking pleasure, spirituality, and balance by traveling to Italy, India, and Indonesia, respectively. Eat, Pray, Love is the account of how she lives and what she learns during this year.

I really wanted to like this book. And I think the reasons I didn't probably say much more about myself than they do anything else. Another person might very well find Gilbert charming and the book a delight. But I did not.

I did, however, really enjoy the first section about Gilbert's travels through Italy. She explores the country with the sole goal of seeking pleasure, savoring the cuisine and reveling in the sound of each syllable of the language. As Italy is at the top of my list of desirable trip destinations, I loved every bit of this section.

After Italy, Gilbert spends four months in an ashram in India, devoting each day to intense religious study and practice. And while I found the details of her experience interesting on a cultural level, I read the descriptions of her personal spiritual revelations with disinterest and even a bit of disdain. I don't believe in a higher power, and so accounts of bright-light warm-fuzzy visions simply turn me off. I find wide-eyed worshipers rather foolish, and so I lost some respect for Gilbert during this section of the book. While I appreciated her openness to meditation and new insight, I chided her for being so gullible to her own mind games. To me, her spiritual transcendence seems trite and untrue.

And then there is Indonesia. I thought she might redeem herself here, since her focus is on balance. And she starts out well. She has come to Indonesia to spend time with a wise and wonderful medicine man she had previously befriended. She visits him each day; he heals the villagers that come to him and imparts knowledge to her. They have profound conversations, and he is, quite simply, a beautiful soul. And then Gilbert takes a Brazilian lover and is so consumed by their passion that she no longer has time to visit the medicine man. So much for balance. She tries to justify it, but frankly her attempts are even less convincing than her spiritual discoveries. She had, in fact, taken a vow of celibacy at the beginning of the trip in order to prevent distraction during her search for self. But she completely loses her head in Indonesia, in addition to her purpose.

One reviewer of the book states that there isn't a more likable writer than Gilbert. And her words do come across as if she's simply chatting with a friend. But if she were my friend, I'd be phasing her out. I just found her profoundly annoying. There were occasional moments when I completely related to her, when she wrote something that perfectly encapsulated a thought I've had. But those moments were fleeting, and if anything just set me up for disappointment.

When she first decides to go on this trip, Gilbert writes that she likes the fact that each country she will visit begins with an I. Because what she is embarking upon is a search for herself, for "I." (And that was the first time, of many, that I rolled my eyes.) But to me, Gilbert and her book are best described with a different triad of I-words: immature, idealistic, and ineffective.